As Microsoft has added more consumer subscribers to the rolls of Office 365, the amount of revenue per subscriber has fallen, according to estimates based on the limited information the company releases.

The downward trend in revenue-per-subscriber hints at a significant shift to the less expensive rent-not-own plans available to consumers, such as Office 365 Personal, a $69.99 annual deal that provides one Office license for a personal computer and one license for a tablet.

Digium announced the official launch of “Respoke” on their blog today, offering a cloud platform designed to enable communications for web and mobile applications. Respoke provides an API so developers can add live voice, video, messaging, and data services as to other applications; the platform is intended to allow communications feature development in a matter of days.

Panasonic has introduced the KX-NS700, a compact hybrid communications platform optimized for the SMB market. Its features are based on the KX-NS1000 IP Communications Server. Supporting up to 288 extensions with optional expansion units, the unit is designed to help businesses transition to IP in an increasingly mobile and evolving business environment.

Amazon will launch a corporate email and digital calendar service to rival Outlook and Gmail, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

The new service, called WorkMail, is powered by Amazon's cloud-based computing unit, Amazon Web Services (AWS). The company plans to price WorkMail competitively with Microsoft's Office 365 and Google's business-oriented services, which also include programs like word processing and spreadsheets.

Soon, it will be a lot easier to do voice and video calls within the Slack online collaboration service, aka the “Trojan horse for bigger ideas.”
That’s because Slack, with just under 100 employees, is acquiring Screenhero—a much smaller desktop collaboration company that graduated from the Y Combinator startup incubator just two years ago.

Microsoft's cloud-based Office 365 is the company's fastest growing commercial product ever, and adoption shows no sign of stalling. The company's cloud revenue (which included Azure and Dynamics CRM as well as Office 365) grew 128 percent in the most recent quarter compared to the same period last year, and the number of Office 365 commercial seats in use nearly doubled.

Enterprises want open communication with the people they do business with—but not too open.

AT&T’s UC Federation service, introduced on Thursday, is designed to break down walls between unified communications platforms but let users keep organizational boundaries in place. That should serve two key requirements for large enterprises that find themselves working ever more closely with partners, customers and acquired subsidiaries.